Update on the great-granny squares

I take this little bag with me to work every day and have now crocheted black edges on 36 of the squares in my care, leaving only 15! But I'm afraid that we counted just under a hundred, so there's still a few left and I don't think my mother has had much time to work on the ones she's got.

Many of the squares have some great color combinations, really fresh and sometimes a bit daring for an old lady, I think. So I guess conservative isn't an adjective that would suit my great-granny - luckily!

The other day, I figured out a nice little trick to keep track of all the squares - I just strung them all on a piece of yarn and tied the ends together. Very simple, yet very effective. And maybe it's a widely used trick and you're all thinking 'I always do that!' - yeah, well, now I'm in on it, too ;)

I'm sorry that some of my pictures come out a bit blurry or too bright sometimes - I'm still fine-tuning my photography skills with the help of a lovely little book called 'The Busy Girl's Guide to Digital Photography', which I bought here. There are many things that I've been doing wrong for years, I'm afraid, but I'm working on them now!

A teenage blanket

Now this blanket was made by my mother when she was a bit older - about 14 or 15 years old. By this time, she had realized that it is so much easier to make one big square, rather than first crocheting lots of little ones, crocheting edges on them and finally assembling the whole thing. Her first blanket was 8 x 15 squares, so that makes four yarn-ends per square (if we count the black edge), a total of 480 ends to weave in!! And after that, she had to sew them all together, which must also have made a few more ends. By my count, this new blanket would have produced about 60 yarn ends...

So yes, as a teenager, she chose the easier method of one big square, elongated with extra bands of color at either end to make it rectangular. Unfortunately, this large piece of knitting was rather more difficult to carry around than the small squares had been, so she did most of the work on this blanket at home. So if you decide to start making a blanket, it might be worth considering that if you are a sociable knitter, you might have to choose the more cumbersome (but certainly no less charming) method of the small granny squares!

As for colors, this time, she had some larger batches of left-over yarn from a blanket which my grandmother had made some time previously. This blanket (which I will be showing you soon) was made as a black background with small yellow and orange squares dotted around. This meant that there was quite a lot of yellow and orange for my mother's blanket, which she used for the outer, and thus longer rounds. In the center, she used small scraps of yarn, which were more suitable for the short rounds. As you can see, though, she always used the scraps up completely so that some rounds changed color halfway.

Another world

The first blanket I've found is one that my mother made when she was quite young, around 10 years old. It is made as a bedspread, with a tasselled edge on one long side only. The principle is the same as for the blanket we are now making for my aunt: squares of different colors edged with black and sewn together. The squares are really made in much the same way as a granny square, except that the pattern is made crocheting back and forth instead of in the round.

My mother sometimes babysat two small children in the evening - that was no problem in a little fishing village in northern Denmark in the late 1960s. She had already started running errands when she was three, going to her uncle's shop for groceries and even taking some rather large sums of money to deposit in the bank. My grandmother often says that it was a completely different, safe world back then - but even so, she feels that life is much less harsh today.

In any case, my 10-year-old mother had plenty of hours to crochet every time she babysat and had put the children to bed, so it only took her a few months to finish her bedspread. She could crochet about seven squares in an evening and used leftover yarn from home and some from old, worn-out sweaters which had served their purpose. Some of the squares are slightly stiffer than the rest because they are made from wool for carpet-weaving, which she had been given by my grandmother's friend.

I asked her about the choice of color, and she chuckled and said that there wasn't really all that much choice - she just used what she had. Upcycling and recycling was very much a part of everyday life - not because it was hip, or a matter of principle, but out of necessity. My grandfather was a fisherman, but fish can be fickle, so it is best not to rely too heavily on them. My grandmother has lots of great tips on living in an economical and certainly eco-friendly way - I'll be sharing some of them as we go along.

Differentiated granny squares

Oh, but before I get carried too far away into something else, here are a couple of pics of a little project I've been working on (or simply thinking about) for a couple of years now. I haven't got the patience to make the same kind of granny square over and over again, and this slightly wilder version of the classic blanket will allow me to try out some new techniques. I mentioned it to my mom, and she suggested that she and my sister could help me make it, a fun thing to do together during the winter months. So hopefully, now that I'm not the only one invested in the project, things might actually start happening!

Where it all started

I was sitting in the train on my way to work last Wednesday morning, way too early. This could have been a very boring trip, except for the fact that I was having a great time with a crochet hook and some yarn. My mom and I have undertaken to crochet black edges on some granny squares and eventually assemble them to make a blanket for my aunt. It just so happens that a trainride to work is just the amount of time it takes me to crochet an edge on one of these squares.

But these squares aren't just any granny squares. They were made by my great-grandmother long before she died 15 years ago, and have just been lying in an attic, waiting for my aunt to come along, pick them up and decide that they should be brought out into the light again. At first, I must admit I was a bit jealous that I hadn't found them first - I love anything old and handmade, and after all, I was named after my great-grandmother! After a little bit of thought, though, I realized that I really do want my aunt to have the finished blanket. She and my great-grandmother were very close, and this blanket will hold so many more memories for her than it ever could for me. So all is as it should be.

It makes me happy that we have a tradition for cherishing handmade things in my family. We admire the handiwork and the many hours that have gone into making a crocheted blanket or a beautiful tablecloth, and we fondly remember the person who made it, whether or not they are still with us. Call me sentimental, but it always makes me sad to find carefully handmade blankets and sweaters abandoned in a thrift shop, with no one to remember the person who made them.

So I think that the first task I will set myself is to sniff out all the handmade blankets in the family and tell their stories. I will keep you up to date on the great-granny squares, as well, and tell you more about my great-grandmother's creations.